undu

Of the ones I’ve tried that are fully open-source is the best ons regarding UX functionality.

For example, Matrix is a UX nightmare, with many different clients implementing different features, or having issues if a non-default login mode is used, ending in people getting locked out after the browser logged them out because they forgot to copy a key when they were logged in.

Others like rocketchat are opencore like matter most, which means they can do the switcheroo.

The things I would care the most when checking this kind of service are:

• UX: how easy it is to use for nontechnical users
• how well-backed is the project, socially and financially, to ensure it lasts a long time
• how easy it is to get the (public) conversations out, as an exit strategy, if the one above isn’t looking so good.

There’s a relatively new latex replacement, which is much easier to use, although its ecosystem is not as complete (obviously)

https://typst.app/

(The CLI tools are OpenSource and independent from the GUI thing they sell)

I’ve used Wayland exclusively for years, but here’s an example: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/

tl;Dr the Wayland ecosystem has still not caught up in all edge cases, the weirder setup you have the more likely you’re affected

Vates demoed on kubecon an ARM workstation running XCP-ng, a xen-based virtualization platform.

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2025/11/13/xcp-ng-on-arm-with-ampere/

It’s still early days, but I’m hoping it can reach homelabs, the big question being hardware enablement, which is difficult on ARM baseboards due to lack of standardization.

Disclaimer: I work with Vates, and prepared some component to compile under ARM to prepare the demo.